


Trackless Road

by Morbane



Category: Map - Jason Webley (Song)
Genre: Constructive Criticism Welcome, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 15:12:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard sees himself as Orpheus, bringing Katia back when her thoughts follow the dead. Katia wants to tell him that she has always been right here.</p><p>But Richard is not entirely misled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trackless Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sleepfighter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepfighter/gifts).



> Thank you to broadcastdelay for very helpful beta comments.
> 
> This story also includes loss of an unborn child and close family.
> 
> Dear sleepfighter, I got a little fixated on the first verse, which is why there are sad things in this story. I hope it falls on the safe side of the line that delineates 'too much angst'.

All was done, now, Katia thought, but all was not quite said.

Richard and Katia, who had buried their daughter in a graveyard set in a green lawn on a cliff above the sea, stood looking out from the height, each waiting for the other to speak.

Katia remembered the day that had brought them here: a day that broke all the rules for days.

She remembered sitting in a hospital room, waiting for the ultrasound tech. Richard had taken her phone and left the room, to call Katia’s manager. She asked the nurse about the day she'd had, and the nurse said, well, not so bad, and they were silent again.

When Richard had come back into the room, he was so pale that she wondered if he'd looked like that before she knew him — before Global Aid, and Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea — before he got so tan — and then she thought that no, she was looking at a Richard from an even older time than that, a much younger Richard, Richard as a child. The layers of life on his face were scraped back almost to the bone.

"Tell me," she told him.

"Barton called," said Richard, "about your mother." A flush was creeping back into his face.

"How bad, this time?"

"This time it's over." He stuttered on the last word. He gave her back the phone, and she pocketed it, then took his hand.

"Another stroke," Katia said.

"Yes," said Richard. The nurse was staring at them. Both of them shook their heads - not now, not here, not inside of this different thing. The door opened and the tech came in.

"I'll talk to you later," said Richard, absurdly, because he wasn't going anywhere, but Katia understood.

* * *

At the end of that day, she had thought: I am neither a mother nor a daughter. Organising her mother’s funeral, she had thought: There is death inside me and outside me. She had not said either of those things. There were a lot of dramatic things she had not said. Instead she had said to Richard, “You’re okay.” She had said to Mrs Berens, “Of course I remember you. I’m so glad you’ve come.” She had said to herself: "These things are just as true."

It was when she and Richard were alone that the most dangerous words came to mind. Richard was always present, always vital, almost manic. She said she was fine: he said he believed in her. She told him a memory; he told her that he understood what it must mean to her, and he told her that meaning. He looked to her for every indicator of what to feel. He amplified whatever she said. She wanted to scream. She wanted to shut down. She wanted to reach out. And she did. But they couldn't quite touch. 

Richard expected her to cry.

The images and memories of those weeks that she _had_ held tight behind her eyelids, until now, were the brightest ones. Mrs Berens had come over one lovely afternoon to talk about puppies and pottery. Her coworker Jolene had invited her out to the zoo with Jolene’s nephews and niece, and she had lived intensely inside that day as though there were no others to either side of it. One day, a desert geographer had sent into their office a report that was so badly formatted that the contour lines were literally impossible — she and Jolene had giggled about that report until Jolene almost fell over, and afterwards, she had held that scene up to the light, in her mind, as if it were stained glass.

Richard had said pointedly, “You’ve made me lunch today. You never make me lunch. Are you okay?”

 _”Yes,”_ Katia had said pointedly back, clasping his hands, finding this funny. But it wasn’t funny now, on a hillside over the sea.

Now, if she were honest with herself, those moments of not touching, such as when Richard reached to hug her and she wasn’t sure which of them flinched, were truer record of the first four weeks after her deaths. Now, if she were honest with herself, she could admit that whenever Richard had been watching, she had been curled into a ball, refusing to deal with grief _and_ with Richard’s need for her to grieve.

Now, Katia stretched her hands out, feeling glad and guilty that her body was her own again, working and pulling together. She took a breath.

“I imagined them together, that day,” she said, “my mother, and Sophia, as if they were going down a road together, holding hands.” And then she wondered if that were too cruel, the image of Sophia as a toddler or a child.

Richard gave her a very sharp look.

“I think,” he said, “part of you is with them on that road.”

Katia’s mouth fell open. “But I’m right here,” she said blankly. Finally, really.

“It's so clear, that way,” Richard said, looking past her, out to sea, and she had a feeling he wasn't talking about a metaphor.

He didn’t seem to see her at all. That was Katia’s exasperated conclusion as they walked down the hill together, drove home together, and ate dinner together. Richard smiled at her when she came back from walking Jackie, but she saw him checking the way she put Jackie's lead away, as though expecting her to be absent about this and other things.

That night, before they turned the lights off, she held his fingers up to her left wrist.

“Ahah,” she said. “The intrepid explorer discovers a landmark”— sliding her arm down within his grasp— “a cleft in the valley,” stopping his index finger in the crook of her elbow, “a path upwards,” and she nestled her chin in his hand. “Look,” she said again. “I’m right here.”

But in the morning his eyes were the same, looking at her as if she were not really Katia, but a signpost that would show him where Katia had gone.

* * *

They'd met at a party where Katia's best friend Yan had told Katia that Richard was just back from disaster relief in Sudan, and told Richard that Katia was studying molecular gastronomy.

What did you do with introductions like that? They led more readily to _Awesome_ s and vapid _That's interesting_ s than to some realer meeting. But somehow Katia's words hadn't slid past Richard, and his eyes hadn't glazed past her, and they'd wound up on the back porch while Yan left them alone to clean up after the party.

Now Katia imagined them returned to that moment, without topics, let alone words.

* * *

They went out to the drylands, where the desert soughed in among trees and grasses. It was Katia’s idea, or possibly Jolene’s; Jolene had managed to make opportunity out of disaster in the paperwork for Katia’s leave. Katia's mother's farmhouse, built much earlier in the desert’s campaign against the country, had been the center for pens of ostriches, sheep, and goats long past Katia’s childhood. To Katia, it felt inviting, rather than mournful. It was warm: the embers of Lise’s life were still alight in it. Barton handed the keys over to them and said he was going west for a little while.

Katia had packed jerseys, her oldest pairs of jeans, Jackie's dog bed, books, canning jars, knitting, and coils of wire. Richard packed his harmonica and his autoharp, several DVDs of standup comedy, a velvet pouch of semiprecious stones, candles, and other assortments, and wine.

"What are these for?" Katia asked him, as they unpacked.

"Finding you," Richard said.

Katia sighed, her hands on her hips.

"Your aura is nearly white," Richard said seriously. He looked down at the jerseys spilling out of her suitcase. "You've lost so much weight." 

And if I was comfort-eating and grew three sizes, would you be worried about that? Katia thought, frustrated. You're a nurse. You've no need to make so much of a mystery of the way people function. Or maybe you do.

"We're barely talking," Richard said, and she had to concede that, as a pause in her stream of silent retorts.

Katia said, "Okay: what do you think is happening with me?"

"I think energy is draining out of you, going somewhere I can't see," Richard said.

She said, "How will you know when you've found me?"

"That's a good question," Richard said. "I know some ways to look, and some ways to call, and I'll run out of leads to follow eventually, you know, but — I'm not sure. You must think I'm crazy."

"It's only fair," Katia said, since he seemed to think something similar about her. She'd known he believed in auras, in rising and ascendant signs, and the rule of three, but never before had his practice felt like something practised on her.

"I'm sorry," Richard said. "Just give me some time." He went back to the suitcase, and laid the stones out carefully on a shelf: agate, moonstone, aventurine, garnet.

She unpacked the canning jars, and started to knit a new jersey, and spent some days out repairing fences. Richard cooked meals and didn't talk about auras or influences. That, after all, was part of the overt reason they'd come: if they could not think or talk through things, they could at least _do_. There was a week of peace.

* * *

They made a camp fire one evening in the cooking pit off to the side of the driveway. They roasted things (mushrooms, marshmallows, meat) on iron skewers, and drank the best of Richard's wine. Before the sky went dark, it put on a show: there were the kind of clouds that were either orange or pink, depending on whether you decided the polished sky behind them was steel gray or silver-blue. Katia sat facing east and tilted her head back slowly west, daring the sky to draw her over the edge of the world.

Richard said, "I've nearly got it, Katia. I know where to go now."

She felt a spike of sadness. "My knight," she said, "on a magical quest, for my heart locked away in a box, on the other side of the sea."

He played her a song on the autoharp, in a minor key that stroked across her skin and under it. Katia shivered.

She didn't remember putting out the fire and coming inside, but she woke up alone in the bed the next morning. The fire pit was black and cold and the autoharp lay beside it with all of its strings gone. Richard was gone too.

* * *

Richard took water, food, a compass, a reflective blanket, and a radio, one of a pair whose match sat in the farmhouse kitchen. He took the strings of the autoharp woven around with Katia's hair, and a map, and a flute carved from a swan bone. 

He walked from dawn until the height of the day, and then he noted the position his GPS gave him, raised the flute to his lips, closed his eyes, and walked forwards fifty paces, slowly, brushing feet through stubbly grasses and stones that lay in the way, keeping the sun over his left shoulder.

He paused after the first song's first verse. As he began the bridge, a wave of sound washed up around it, a moaning drone, a surge of sighs. As the bridge died away, it resolved itself into a pattern: the sound of a sea on a shore.

He played two more verses, took a sightless sip of water from his camel pack, and started on another song. He'd lost count of his steps, but that didn't matter. The path would end with his songs.

When Richard opened his eyes, the colours of the world tilted upright; the sky went green before it settled at blue. His very feet ended in a mirage that flickered silver and gold against the desert's sandy brown. He was in the middle of a miasmic ocean, but he could see the shore.

There was someone waiting there.

* * *

Richard stepped out of the water, squinting at the woman waiting there, waiting for her to resolve into a familiar shape.

And then she did.

" _You,_ " said Richard, to a ghost who was not Katia — who did not resemble her at all. She wore long skirts torn up in strips, and the thirst in her face hurt almost as much to look at as the sun's glare.

"Me," said the ghost. "I have forgotten my other names."

"How did you come here?" Richard asked her.

"With you," said the ghost. "You came to my island. You saw me. When you rowed away again, I came with you."

"Five years ago?" said Richard.

Then, he had been part of a team installing water tanks on various islands around the Solomon Sea. That had been two years of idealism and pragmatism, broken up by months of rain and wind.

One day he'd taken the little dinghy, checked its outboard motor, and set off for Sandy Island, because it was the only island on the map he hadn't yet seen.

As it turned out, there was no Sandy Island. There was only a map-ghost of an island, and that island's ghost.

Richard came back from that project with his eyes open wide to moonlight, to auras, to leylines, and to pasts and futures visible in the air. Now, he realised, he had returned with a passenger.

"How is it," Richard asked his ghost, "that I never knew you were there?"

The ghost said, "I only wanted passage. You were my ferryman. You brought me to death at last, and I let go of you, to take the same road as your daughter and your lover's mother. But you've been calling me back — and here I am. I only wanted to go. Take me off this island again."

"It was you I saw," Richard said, "on that road," thinking of the three figures he'd seen, Sophia and Sophia's grandmother and another, when he'd stood with Katia above the sea.

She nodded.

Richard picked his ghost up and settled her on his back again, the weight familiar. She pointed over his right shoulder, and he set off through the surf that roared in his ears, even when the sun went down and it no longer danced in his eyes.

He walked without looking at his map, without checking the stars, and without taking care that they went in a straight line. He walked through a force like water, or like a thicker oil. He walked until the ghost's soft breath sounded above the surf.

And then there was no sound at all but the cry of a bird at dawn, and the ghost was gone, and he found himself walking up the gravel driveway, in sight of Katia's door.


End file.
